Notices by Brad (bk1e@mastodon.social), page 2

@swelljoe @thomasfuchs I’m shocked to learn that SmartMedia and xD used a bare NAND flash with no controller or wear leveling. Perhaps NAND was more reliable back then but today this seems like living dangerously.

It sounds like SmartMedia lost because it had a max capacity of 128 MB. Having two incompatible versions with different voltages probably didn’t help. (These also seem like consequences of exposing a bare NAND flash with no controller.)

@thomasfuchs Are the descriptions generated with eBay’s AI tool all marked “Generated with eBay.ai”? For every one of those, I find 10x as many that are not labeled but which sound like ChatGPT regurgitating a catalog page.

@JTS @thomasfuchs Speaking of playing music: the small white 4-pin connector above the “Wave Blaster upgrade option” connector was for connecting the CD-ROM drive’s analog audio output. Many CD drives couldn’t accurately extract digital audio over IDE/SCSI/whatever without clever software such as “cdparanoia”.

@thomasfuchs He is living comfort eagle

@thomasfuchs Note: the new offers appear to be more expensive than the grandfathered $10/month “Photography (20GB)” plan. I’m hanging on to that one.

@Gargron Also @jensorensen @mcfadden @jonrosenberg @catandgirl

@thomasfuchs I distinctly remember renting the original^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Greedo-shot-first Star Wars trilogy in preparation for watching The Phantom Menace, which I heard was going to be to be great.

@thomasfuchs @timthelion That is interesting considering the recent controversy over the .NET “Moq” library sending hashes of developers’ email addresses to the cloud. It’s no longer private when someone has a database to do hash -> email lookups.

@thomasfuchs Very nice. That looks like daylight (or at least not dark yet). Did you use a lightning trigger? I have one but haven’t used it in a few years. I should get it out next time there’s a storm.

@thomasfuchs I sometimes wonder if these companies care more about how the back of the display looks than how the front of the display looks.

My workaround is to rotate the monitor halfway to portrait mode so I can see the ports, but not all monitor stands support this.

@thomasfuchs Hey Siri, whatever happened to speech recognition technology?